Poems of Coleridge

e it was
this profound dissatisfaction with less than the perfect form of every art,
passion, thought, or circumstance, that set him adrift in life, making him
seem untrue to duty, conviction, and himself, it was this also that formed
in him the double existence of the poet and the philosopher, each
supplementing and interpenetrating the other. The poet and the philosopher
are but two aspects of one reality; or rather, the poetic and the
philosophic attitudes are but two ways of seeing. The poet who is not also
a philosopher is like a flower without a root. Both seek the same
infinitude; one apprehending the idea, the other the image. One seeks truth
for its beauty; the other finds beauty, an abstract, intellectual beauty,
in the innermost home of truth. Poetry and metaphysics are alike a
disengaging, for different ends, of the absolute element in things.

In Coleridge, metaphysics joined with an unbounded imagination, in equal
flight from reality, from the notions of time and space. Each was an equal
den